Drink Different – Nobody Got Paid For That Pour
Nobody Got Paid For That Pour
I went to a wine festival last weekend as a punter, not a producer. Here is the part of the ticket price nobody explains.
I spent last Saturday at a wine weekend. Ticket in hand. No stand to stand behind, no branded shirt, nobody asking me what the tannins were doing. First time in years I have been to one of these as a customer.
It was a good day. The kind where you walk a road in the sun, meet strangers, and lose track of time. I would go again, and that is not a diplomatic sentence.
I also learned more in six hours about how these things actually work than in ten years of working them.
What you think you bought
North of R700 for the ticket. For that you get entry and a glass. The glass is a standard tasting glass, nothing you would choose, and you will leave it on a wall somewhere by mid-afternoon and never think about it again.
Then you walk up and down the road and you taste.
By late afternoon I had heard the same complaint three or four times, from different people at different stands. Some version of: I paid a lot of money for this and they are giving me nothing in the glass.
Underneath that complaint sits an assumption. The assumption is that the ticket money went to the wineries, and the wineries are now being tight with wine they have already been paid for.
That assumption is exactly backwards.
Where the money actually goes
Ticket revenue goes to the organiser. That is normal, and it is not a scandal. Organisers carry real cost and real risk: the venue, the licence, the marketing, the security, the toilets, the insurance, and the very real chance that it rains and nobody comes. Running an event is a thankless job. You get every opinion in the room whether you asked for it or not, and the loudest ones arrive from people who have had four hours of free wine.
But the winery pouring for you did not see a cent of your ticket.
The winery paid to be there. A stand costs money. Then they loaded a bakkie with their own stock, drove it in, paid two people to stand behind a table for two days, put them up somewhere, and poured that stock into your glass for free.
Every drop you tasted was inventory that will never be sold. They gave it to you on the hope, a hope, not a plan, that you would buy something, or remember them, or ask for them in a shop.
Now do the maths on the pour
This is where a small pour stops being rudeness and starts being arithmetic. Round numbers below, and deliberately generic. This is not about any one event.
Take a bottle. Pour it out at a show the way people actually want it poured, properly, not a measured 25ml, and you get about ten glasses out of it.
A R100 bottle: every pour is R10 of stock out the door.
A R400 bottle: every pour is R40.
Same bottle. Same ten pours. Four times the cost to give away.
Now scale it. A stand that goes through eight cases over a weekend has poured out ninety-six bottles. At R100 a bottle that is under ten grand of stock. At R400 a bottle it is close to forty.
Add the stand fee, two staff, the travel, the accommodation. Call the weekend R45,000 all-in for a producer at the serious end, and that is a friendly number. To claw back to zero on R250 bottles they need to sell about 180 of them. Fifteen cases. At the show. Over two days. And that is the flattering version of the sum, because those 180 bottles cost money to make before anybody sold them.
I walked the length of that road on Saturday with a case under my arm and a couple of loose bottles. I was looking. I saw almost nobody else carrying wine.
The uncomfortable bit for the good stuff
Follow the arithmetic to where it lands, and you find something worth knowing.
The producer with the R80 bottle can pour like a hero all weekend. It costs them almost nothing and they will be remembered as generous.
The producer with the R450 bottle is doing sums with every single pour, all day, and hoping you do not notice.
So the wine you are most likely to be handed a proper glass of is, structurally, the cheapest wine on the road. And the person you are most likely to accuse of being stingy is the one who brought the most expensive thing there.
That is not a moral failing at either end. It is what happens when the model is: pay to attend, then give your product away. The model rewards volume and punishes quality, and nobody designed it that way on purpose.
And the industry defence does not really hold either
The answer producers give to all of this, including us, is that it is a marketing exercise. Long-term brand building. They will remember us.
So be honest for a second. How many times have you had a genuinely great day at a wine festival and then, three weeks later, walked into a shop and deliberately bought a wine you tasted there?
For most people, the answer is near zero. Not because the wine was not good. Because you had a brilliant time. You were social, you were in the sun, you were talking to people. The wine is not what you took home from the day. The day is what you took home from the day.
That is the entire point of a wine festival, and it is also why the marketing story is thinner than we like to admit.
None of this is a complaint
Nobody makes a winery attend a show. We sign the form, we pay the fee, we load the bakkie. If the sums do not work, that is ours to look at. Not the organiser’s, and definitely not yours.
The reason to write it down is the gap. You were standing there thinking you had paid for wine and were not getting it. The person opposite you was counting what was left in the box and working out how to explain the weekend on Monday. Two people at one table, a metre apart, holding completely different pictures of the same transaction, with no way to find out.
Six things worth doing next time you go
Not a manifesto. Just things that make the day better for you and for the person pouring.
- Ask for a taste, then ask for more. A small pour first, and if you like it, say so and hold your glass out. Nobody refuses that. Almost nobody asks.
- Photograph the label of anything you loved. You will not remember it. You will be completely certain that you will.
- Buy it at the show. That is the only moment the producer sees any money at all from the day, and it costs you nothing extra — you were going to buy wine at some point anyway.
- Find out who is pouring. If it is the owner or the winemaker, you are talking to the person who made every decision in that glass. That conversation is worth more than the ticket, and it is free.
- Go easy on the verdict. A 20ml pour, warm, in a tent, at half past two, after eleven other wines, is not the wine. It is a snapshot taken in bad light.
- Spit, or accept the consequences. Both are legitimate. Only one of them leaves you able to taste anything by four o’clock.
Then have a good day. That is what the ticket is actually for.
Just know that the wine in your glass was a gift, and the person who gave it to you paid for the privilege.